FILMED BEAUTY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4435, 3 July 1922, Page 1

FILMED BEAUTY.

(By Charles McEvoy.) At last there is something new under the sun. It has been there a long while, but it needed someone with the simpleness of true genius to find it It is the “slow movement film,’’ and it is hardly too much to say that it is the revelation of a totally new form of artistic expression. It is so simple that it appears to be nothing more than running a spool of pictures very slowly througn the proi jectpr. Probably the result is not arrived at that way .at all, for there Is not the faintest flicker or unsteadiness, but to sit and watch one of these demonstrations of the analysis of movement is to experience an entirely new thrill. It is actually screened poetry—the poetry of motion expounded as it has never been expounded before. Take the simple picture of a girl diver plunging from a springboard. Really running, she is shown to come slowly forward step by step with such grace as no dancer has ever achieved'. Ever so quietly the hands are raised, and then, like nothing ever seen in a human being before, her body goes slowly up into the air and turns over on some unseen pivot like the very last revolution of a wheel be-i fore it stops. Down tp the water she floats and, scarcely disturbing che surface, disappears inch by inch! The effect on the onlooker is to produce a sensation of uhcanniness. One is watching something .that shows the ,

human species in a new light. It is a relief when the same picture is shown at normal speed and the diver runs with the familiar step down the springboard, plunges off, turns a somersaults, and disappears .with a cheerful splash into the water. One is relieved, yes—but fpr ever afterwards something will be missing. We shall never again see a girl diver as a beautiful thing. That is actually the result —to resent the violence pf quick motion because we know now how beautiful slow motion is. Really the whole thing is an extraordinary exposition, of “relativity.” Something that, if facts are material, is essentially the same is shown and proved .to be tptally different. What proposition can be more amazing that that Mlle. Suzanne Lenglen should outgrace Isadora Duncan 1 And yet this is what actually happens when ypu see a slow-move-ment picture of one of the famous dawn tennis player’s leaps and bounds about the court. It is not .top much to say that ho dancer has ever danced as Suzanne dances when the .camera watches her through these new eyes. Will so extraordinary a discovery have any lasting effect on any art ? Yes, I think it wilL and particularly on the art of dancing. I believe myself that it will revolutionise .it.